The inspiration for the study came from embroidery.
You dont need to touch a stack of books to judge its stability.
You dont have to feel a bowling ball to guess how many pins it will knock over.
A diagram of the grief knot.© CountingPine, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
But knots seem to strain our judgement mechanisms in interesting ways.
The test Croom and Firestone conducted for the study was relatively simple.
The participants failed spectacularly.
They were then presented with videos of each knot slowly rotating, and they failed at this, too.
The few times the participants guessed correctly, they did so for the wrong reasons.
The researchers concluded that most people simply cannot differentiate a weak knot from a strong one by sight.
People are terrible at this, said Firestone.
Humanity has been using knots for thousands of years.
Theyre not that complicatedtheyre just some string tangled up.
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